Comments on: Sharing an External Drive Between a PC and a Mac, exFAT Discussion, Results

By: Sean C

Sean C — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:29:13 +0000

exFAT support has been added as of Mac OS X 10.6.5. I use a single partition exFAT formatted 500GB external HD as a perfect combo storage on my MBP w/ Win7 and MacOS.

Cheers~

By: barnesytv

barnesytv — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:14:16 +0000

try formatting the drive on the mac as exfat first. My Xp machine can even see it although I had to download the exfat update from microsoft first.
Brian Barnes
http://www.activideo.co.uk

By: wildcatherder

wildcatherder — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:39:39 +0000

I do appreciate the effort that went into this, as I have done similar things. However, if the title had been “Sharing an External Drive Between a PC and a Mac, NOT with exFAT”, it would have saved me a lot of time.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:32:06 +0000

Thanks for the info. You saved me hours of time.

By: karin

karin — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 04:10:15 +0000

@ Mat, I got a 2.5TB external hard drive and i want to use it on both my iMac and my husbands pc (windows 7). It was not formatted for my Mac so i formatted it with ExFat and it works great with my Mac but when i connect it to the pc, it doesn’t recognize it at all… so I wonder what you did. I followed this link: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/291/p/228,219,289/c/123/session/L3RpbWUvMTMwOTcxNzcyOS9zaWQvSE1tVlIzeWs%3D , but chose exFat instead. The only thing with this was that in step 4 it says to choose Master Boot Record but they have selected Apple Partition Map. I used the second and that might have been why it’s not working…
But I don’t know, anybody able to help me?

By: flyguy_107@hotmail.com

flyguy_107@hotmail.com — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:12:38 +0000

WOW amazing post well written and very easy to understand best post ever and very helpful

By: MacFuse

MacFuse — Fri, 20 May 2011 03:44:13 +0000

There have lots of files corrupted issues reported by using NTFS3G or other equivalent software. Please take note.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

For me I’m using exFAT without any issue.

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:54:33 +0000

Hi, I had the same problem, yesterday I did this: I’m running Mac os x on a MacBook Pro 10.6.7 Snow Leopard, and Windows 7 ultimate 64bit. I used to deal with the NTFS format but as you said you can’t write data to the disk on Mac os X. Yesterday I formatted the hard drive with the ExFat option but not via windows, instead directly with the os x disk utility, now I can perfectly read and write data on both operating systems no matter files size. That solved all my problems.

By: Tim Lyke

Tim Lyke — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:39:16 +0000

Running 10.6.6 Snow Leopard and formatted partition in OSX using ExFAT for a 90GB partition. Copied files from OSX to verifiy copy. Booted in Windows 7 and copied entire music library to new shared partition. Booted into Snow Leopard and currently importing to ITunes.

Looks like it works great – at least if you create teh partition in MAC OS.

By: djlaube

djlaube — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:15:55 +0000

Thanks all for the updates. I’ll have to retry my tests with OS X 10.6.4 or greater (especially now that 10.6.6 is out).

@Kellan – I was running 10.6.1 since in October 2009 when I wrote the article, that was the latest at the time..